‘The Intensity, the Passion Can Smoulder beneath
the Surface’

Camilla Hambro is Associate Professor at the Department
of Musicology at Åbo Akademi University, teaching in a broad variety
of fields, among others music history and analysis, music and gender,
women in music history, Nordic music history, research theory and
methodology, and she supervises theses at all levels. Hambro holds
a PhD in music history and analysis (University of Gothenburg) with
a dissertation was on Agathe Backer Grøndahl: What smoulders
beneath the surface. Agathe Backer Grøndahl (1847-1907), gender,
genre and Norwegianness. She also holds an M.A. in music
history (University of Oslo) with a Master’s thesis on Hildegard
of Bingen and her Ordo virtutum and a B.A. in music, theatre
and literature (University of Oslo). Her articles on Nordic Music
history are published in the Kapralova Society Journal,
Swedish Musical Heritage as well as a variety of Nordic
journals and German anthologies.

This musical analysis of “To the Queen of my Heart” starts out
from reception materials connected to Agathe Backer Grøndahl’s and
Nina Grieg’s performances of the romance and tries to trace the
critics’ descriptions in the score. Focus is directed on how the
performed song becomes performative via the reception materials,
hers, the listeners’ and amateur performers’ “producerly texts”
attached to them. In her interpretation of three different versions
of the poem Backer Grøndahl shows her masterly ability to express
unspoken, but very important words for thoughts that are not explicitly
stated. In this way her romance, in a Mendelssohnian sense, explores
the limits of language. On a general level the song’s identification
process plays on what the composer, listener or musician places
in the voice part. Not only does the voice construct impressions
about the poem and the singer’s persona, it also
assigns positions for the listener, whether or not s/he chooses
to identify with the subject of the song or the object of her/his
passion. The romance illustrates the possibility to choose interpretations
that stay on good terms with alternative as well as recommended,
gendered practice, whether a woman sings it to a man or another
woman, or a man sings it to a woman or another man.

Introduction

At the beginning of my doctoral studies at the University of
Gothenburg, I was encouraged to contribute to a popular scientific
event at a university open day under the umbrella term ‘Beneath
the Surface’. As I was working on a thesis on the Norwegian composer
Agathe Backer Grøndahl (1847–1907), participating seemed particularly
fitting. In 1947, the Norwegian composer and music critic Pauline
Hall held a lecture entitled ‘The Intensity, the Passion Can Smoulder
under the Silent Surface’ at the 100th anniversary of Grøndahl’s
birth.1The title is a quotation from Pauline Hall, ‘Intensiteten,
lidenskapen kan ulme under den stille overflaten’, lecture at Agathe
Backer Grøndahl’s centennial memorial, manuscript (Oslo: The National
Library of Norway 1947), reprinted in Nytt fra Norsk musikksamling
No. 2, December, 1997), pp. 5–7. In fact, this very description
of Backer Grøndahl seemed so fitting that part of it ended up in
the title of my doctoral thesis, What smoulders beneath
the surface. Agathe Backer Grøndahl (1847–1907), gender, genre and
Norwegianness (2008).2Camilla Hambro, Det
ulmer under overflaten : Agathe Backer Grøndahl (1847–1907) : genus,
sjanger og norskhet (Gothenburg, 2008). At the very
beginning of my project, the choice of music for my rather short
popular science lecture and article was easy: ‘what smoulders beneath
the surface’3Camilla Hambro, ‘ “Intensiteten, lidenskapen
kan ulme under den stille overflaten”. Kan musikk si mer enn ord i
den norske komponisten Agathe Backer Grøndahls sang “Til mit hjertes
Dronning”?’ (Gothenburg, 2005). seemed a particularly fitting
description of one of her earliest compositions, To the
Queen of my Heart (Opus 1 No. 3), a setting of a poem attributed
to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Since my short article and
the completion of my dissertation, I still feel the urge to revisit
this romance in order to flesh out several aspects. Hence, extensive
historical source materials form the basis of this article: reception
materials connected to concert performances of the romance and to
the composition itself; her letters, notebooks, workbooks, sketches
and the printed score.

Performed by the composer herself and Nina Grieg on 25 October
1870, To the Queen of my Heart was published two
years later by Wilhelm Hansen in Copenhagen. Instantly it became
one of Backer Grøndahl’s best known and most frequently performed
works. Starting out from the reception that performances of the
song received, this article sheds light on the critics’ descriptions
in relation to the score and relevant discussions on music, genre,
gender, sexuality, performativity, and the needs of the ‘users’
of the song. This article discusses how a performed song becomes
performative via the reception materials, along with the receptions
of the listeners, the amateur performers, and Backer Grøndahl herself.

Gender, performance, and reception

The poem To the Queen of my Heart begins with
the question ‘shall we roam, my love?’ and we are presented with
two lovers taking a nightly stroll ‘to whisper there, in the cool
night air, what I dare not in broad daylight’. After a concert in
Bergen in 1873, Edvard Grieg’s brother, John, stated in Bergens
Tidende that the song offers a particularly deep insight
into a major talent in the romance genre:

A couple of these songs have already been well received,
and deservedly so, by our music-loving audience (such as, the romance
entitled ‘To the Queen of my Heart’ [...]). We mention this one
in particular because in our opinion it gives the clearest and fullest
insight into a talent which also, and perhaps particularly in this
field, must be acknowledged to be of an exceptionally outstanding
character. Generally – and not without some degree of justification
– one is less inclined to credit women with the power and energy
required to produce a work of art in which an independent and universal
individuality comes to light, and, in the realm of music in particular,
it would seem that, judging by the results, the inferiority of the
‘weaker’ sex manifests itself more so than in any other form of
art. When we therefore in Miss Backer’s composition in general,
and in the abovementioned romance in particular, must acknowledge not
only the presence of an intelligent and poetically inspired interpretation
coupled with a highly advanced development of the technical treatment
of the material, but also a truly singular character that manifests
itself in distinctive melodic and harmonic combinations of unquestionable
and expressive beauty and through which her creative skill closely
and fervently joins in full artistic consciousness the best of what
the modern movement within the same field has achieved, then it
seems to us, as already mentioned, that this aspect of our talented
compatriot’s talent deserves to be mentioned with no less degree
of recognition and admiration.4Bergens Tidende, October
13, 1873.

Three days after her first performance of the song, the
critic in Morgenbladet on 28 October 1870 duly
called attention to the ‘great melodious beauty’ of the entire opus
and how well it came across in Nina Grieg’s ‘moving rendition’.
On 29 November, Aftenbladet’s critic, ‘F.’ (Aimar
Grønvold), emphasised the ‘customary warmth and intensity’ in her
execution of the songs. Moreover, he added that the song bore the
same ‘natural, fresh resonance that characterises Miss Backer’s
playing,’ and was marked by an ‘outstanding and singular beauty’.

In 1882, Swedish critics stated that To the Queen of
my Heart was perhaps the most popular of Backer Grøndahl’s
romances,5Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, April
7, 1884. and took pride of place among her compositions.6Aftonbladet (Stockholm), March 23, 1885. From
a concert in Helsinki in the autumn of 1901, Uusi Suometar reported
in a similar manner on 25 October: ‘In addition to the programme,
the singer [Olivia Dahl], who was accompanied by Backer-Grøndahl
[sic], performed encores, including To
the Queen of my Heart, which at the concerts given by the
Norwegians has become a favourite of our audiences’. Every time To
the Queen of my Heart was put on the programme, Backer
Grøndahl ‘brought the house down’,7Nordisk Musik-Tidende (Kristiania),
No. 6, 1890. and sometimes it was even performed twice
as an encore, as in Turku on 29 October 1901.8Åbo
Underrättelser, October 30, 1901.

During Backer Grøndahl’s career, an intermediate section consisting
of romances and/or piano pieces was a natural, integrated component
of just about all her public concert recitals. Subsequent performances
of To the Queen of my Heart were often given by
female singers. According to Lawrence Kramer’s model, the identification
process in the romance plays on registers which the composer, audience,
or performer give to the singing voice.9Lawrence Kramer, Classical
Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 1995), 147. Not
only does the voice partly construct its own conceptions of the
‘I’ person in the lyrics, the singer’s role and, in extension of
these, the artists Nina Grieg and Agathe Backer, it also signals
positions for the listener, whether he/she chooses to identify with
the ‘I’ person or with his/her chosen one. Whether the subject in
the poem is female or male, however, is difficult to determine when
consulting the performance tradition of the song. Backer Grøndahl
must have been well acquainted with the codes of behaviour that
applied to men and women of her time, and would likely have learned
to behave in a way that was deemed acceptable for women at the time.
The romance genre was also gendered in conflicting ways. The listener
(or the critic) would perhaps prefer to identify with the singer
in a poem in which the lover (a man) invites the queen of his heart
(a woman) to go out into the calm night, and proceeds to tell her
something he has previously not been able to say. Perhaps he expects
that the musical rendition should match the lyrics that dealt with
the feelings of a man.

How were such courting love songs performed by two women perceived
by music critics as mirrors of the female mind? When Louise Pyk
and Robertine Bersén performed To the Queen of my Heart as
an encore at a concert held at the Stora Teatern in Stockholm in the
winter of 1883, it was, according to Stockholms Dagblad, ‘rendered
in a pleasant and emotional manner – always apart from the unnaturalness
of letting a love song to a woman be uttered by a female voice.’10Stockholms
Dagblad, February 6, 1883. The voice has multiple
dimensions as a figure, instrument, body, and individual. It communicates
between the ‘real’ person seen by the audience and the perceived
performative figure. Pyk and Bersén’s version of the love song troubled
the male critic, who perhaps could not identify with the soprano
in the subject matter dealt with in the lyrics (although it should
be noted that neither Backer Grøndahl herself nor the female singers
she accompanied faced this kind of criticism.) Men clearly had the
monopoly on defining how men and women should conduct themselves,
and for him it was clearly unheard of that a woman should perform
a song that dealt with such a theme.

Perhaps the criticism against Pyk and Bersén was due to the fact
that the genre’s expressive message in the nineteenth century was
determined by men, and that such a song in the eyes of the critics
should mirror a woman’s satisfaction at being courted by a man.
On the basis of the poem’s title and lyrics, the critic perhaps
expected a love song from a man to a woman: contemporary romances
characterised women’s sexuality on the condition that they (in a
platonic sense) should desire and satisfy men.

About the poem

For a long time, P. B. Shelley was thought to have written the
poem, but the validity of this claim has subsequently been called
into question, and it is now believed that the author was James
Augustus St. John.11Cf. ‘Appendix E. Misattributions’ in The
Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol 1, edited by
Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (2000). The source is ‘The Eclectic
Review’ (1858) and an article on R.P Gillies’ ‘Memories of a Literary
Veteran’. The fact that the poem was attributed to Shelley
perhaps gave associations to the general opinion regarding his ‘scandalous’
lifestyle. Although Backer Grøndahl had a good command of the English
language, she did not choose to set the original to music, but a
Danish translation in 100 Digte (1867) by Caralis,
a pseudonym for the Danish painter and translator Caspara Preetzmann
(1792–1876).

The poem deals with the relationship between an ‘I’ and ‘you’.
The poet, composer, singer, and pianist create an imaginary picture
of a romantic stroll for the listener. The music is experienced
as if it originates from a couple walking together in the twilight.
There is a sensual fusion of words and tones, and we experience
the stroll through their eyes and ears.12A natural basis of
comparison – musically as well as analytically – is the music by
Delius, discussed by Christopher Morris in Reading Opera
Between the Lines in the chapter entitled: ‘A Walk on the
Wild Side’, 25 ff. The descriptions of nature in the lyrics
can be interpreted as metaphors for their desire: the moon is shining
and caressing the loved one’s brow and cheek. The song’s subject
is engaged in a conversation and is talking to someone, if only
to himself or herself. The purpose of the stroll in the moonlight
is, as the song goes, to ‘whisper, my dear, in the cool of the night
what I never, never, never by daylight could say’. Throughout the
whole song, we sit and wait for this vital disclosure, and the anticipation
reaches its climax when the song sings of ‘kneeling secretly at
your feet’.

The composition is based on only four of the poem’s six stanzas,
each consisting of six lines. The beginnings of the two halves of
the stanzas are set to the same music. Backer Grøndahl’s use of
ritardando in the transition to the fourth line contributes to dividing
the stanzas into two parts. The musical form of the first stanzacan
be depicted schematically:

Lyrics:

1st line

2nd line

3rd line

3rd line

4th line

5th line

6th line

Phrases:

a1

a2

b1

b2

a1

a2

C

No. of bars

1

1

1

1

1

1

1 ½

Bar number

2–3

3–4

4–5

5–6

6–7

7–8

8–10

Backer Grøndahl outlined the rhythmic design of her song in accordance
with the widespread Danish translation by Caralis, which does not
conform to the verse rhythm of the original text attributed to Shelley.
Despite this, the first English edition of the song was printed
with the original English text version, causing unattractive changes
of the rhythmical outline of her melody to make it fit in with the
‘new’ text.13Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, ‘To the Queen of my Heart.
Words by Shelley’, Pitt and Hatzfeld (London, probably 1889), ‘P.
& H. 117’. When the song was reissued in another English
edition in 1907, heed was given to Backer Grøndahl’s original rhythm, so
consequently Caralis’ lyrics had to be translated back into English
again (by Percy Pinkerton).14Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, ‘To my
Heart’s Queen … (English words by P. Pinkerton)’, F. Harris Co (London, 1907). All
three versions of the lyrics are given below. Underlined words indicate
repetitions in the song, with double underlines indicating multiple
repetitions. Two stanzas omitted by Backer Grøndahl are indicated
by a grey font:

Figure 1.

In the original version, the omitted stanzas – including the
violent, frothing ‘restless sea’ and ‘boiling waves’ – had a more
ambiguous sexual meaning than in the Danish translation, which is
quite graphic. Did Backer Grøndahl consider them to be irrelevant
to her reading of the poem?

To achieve the best possible adaptation to the content of the
lyrics, Backer Grøndahl gave To the Queen of my Heart a
modified strophic form, as she most frequently did in her romances.
This particularly applied to the way in which she used contrasting
stanzas, which she generally used to emphasise a contrast in the
poem. Short transitions are often placed between phrases and within
them:

Introduction

A

Transition

A

Transition

B

Transition

A

Conclusion

Bars 1–2

2–10

10–11

11–19

19–27

27–52

52–58

58–66

66–71

The transition between the second and third stanzas is divided
into two parts, clearly marked by changes in tempo and beat. The
first half of the transition, in bars nineteen to twenty-two, has
strong similarities to the first four bars of the postlude and serves
as a continuation and at the same time a conclusion of the accompaniment
in the second stanza. The second half of the transition, in bars
twenty-three to twenty-seven, serves as a prelude to the third and
contrasting stanza, since it consists of a new melody in the pianist's
left hand and a tremolo movement in the right hand. The piano’s
transition with a fermata in bar fifty-five, before the A section
returns, perhaps hints at the two stanzas which have been removed.

Romantic lyricism, musical daydreams and the hermeneutics of
desire

Could daydreams be recounted in music? The challenge of whether
this question should or can be answered lies in retracing what the
performers and their interpretations of the composition may have
invoked of associations and reflections made by the audience, represented
by the music critics. These considerations are complex and closely
linked to who composed, performed, and ‘used’ the music. Lucy Green
describes how performers, composers, and listeners together construct
metaphorical composer and performer ‘masks’.15Lucy Green: Music,
Gender, Education (Cambridge, 1997), 21. However,
she provides no analytical examples of how it is possible in practice
to read a ‘deleneated meaning’ within scores, performances, or critical
reviews. In line with Erving Goffman’s sociopsychological theories,
her ‘mask’ concept can be further interpreted to mean that the music
was simply the ‘peg’ on which the collective product was hung for
a while.16Erving Goffman. Jaget och maskerna. En studie
i vardagslivets dramatik (Stockholm, 1974), 219 f. The
‘masquerade’ could perhaps also work, like in Butler's theories,
as a façade that was so convincing that it seemed real.17Cf.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the subversion
of Identity (New York, 1990), 173. In accordance
with this, users and listeners were mentally shaped not only by
predominant ideologies, but also by Backer Grøndahl, users and listeners
at the actual performance of the song, be it in affirmative, critical,
or excessive ways. In extension of this argument, I regard To
the Queen of my Heart as having numerous potential interpretations
of meaning. Based on media scholar John Fiske’s theories, ‘masks’ seek
to control or limit their potential meanings. At this point, it
seems natural to seek help from outside musicology and refer to
John Fiske’s theories about television viewer experiences:

The viewer’s power to make the meanings that suit
his or her social experience is not, of course, unlimited. Texts
seek to prefer certain meanings, and while offering space for open
or resistive readings, simultaneously attempt to limit that space
to varying degrees. […] Put simply, different programs are designed
(usually fairly successfully) to attract different audiences.18John
Fiske, Television Culture (London, 1987), 179.

The user group transformed To the Queen of my Heart into
a phenomenological reality. In parallel with Fiske’s argument, we
ought also to consider the fact that the users and listeners of
the song create meanings that fit in with their own social experiences.
If we ‘open’19Already in 1962 Umberto Eco launched ‘the open
work’ in The Open Work [Opera Aperta] (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).In 19th century
music the ‘work’ concept was filled by a relatively distinct performer-oriented
tradition. the work, we can say that, according to Fiske’s
model, it becomes a ‘producerly text’ when meanings which it is
capable of making are activated through interaction with listeners
and users. Listening, playing, and writing about a song are all
parts of the process of creating ‘text’, and determine what type
of text is reproduced. In masks as well as in texts, conflicts of
interest between producers and consumers are reproduced. Parallel
with Fiske’s description of soap operas and their ‘denial of a unified
reading position and of a coherent meaning of the text’, we can
therefore probably assume that users of To the Queen of
my Heart have decentred, flexible, and multi-focused subjectivity.20Eco, The Open Work, 195. Uncomplicated
interpretations can be found, ones that lie in the surface in To
the Queen of my Heart as well as in the dominant section
of cultural life in which the song belonged. When the layer of dominant
ideology was removed from the ‘producerly’ text, some of the users
were likely to have been left with redundant meanings that could
be used to exclude the ‘composition mask’. When we consider this
analytically, this opens the door to include more complex positions
for listeners and users of the song, who interweaved their own experiences
with their perception of the song.

In this context one can, as Andreas Ballstaedt and Tobias Widmaier
do with Lieder in their book on Salonmusik, regard To
the Queen of my Heart as a song that can trigger daydreams
about, for example, a person.21Andreas Ballstaedt and Tobias
Widmaier, Salonmusik. Zur Geschichte und Funktion einer
bürgerlichen Musikpraxis (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1989), 338–339. To
achieve this effect, the song must not have been too difficult to
understand, nor presented too much opposition for users or listeners.
The purpose was not to intervene in reality or to change it, but
rather to induce an experience of a better ‘dream world’. The magnificent
natural scenes in the poem set to music could thus be transformed
by the composer and performers/users to a scene and projection screen
for a yearning for something beyond trivial reality. The young girls
of the Norwegian bourgeoisie continued to live with their parents
during the ‘waiting time’ prior to marriage, and this also applied
to the newly engaged Agathe Backer in the beginning of the 1870s
when she composed To the Queen of my Heart. The
girls were totally dependent on their parents; they spent large
parts of their day at home. In their expressive forms, perhaps Lieder –
which Lawrence Kramer wrote – are surprisingly cinematic: as with
films, the pictures and the music blend together right from the
start, and this gives them a dream-like quality. Based on this view,
Backer Grøndahl recreates acoustically and verbally the missing
images and the poem’s imaginary world or, put another way, the components
that are not found in language. In this way, the romance becomes
a visualisation of the image.22Kramer, Classical Music
and Postmodern Knowledge, 143 ff. As an extension
of Kramer’s argument, one could perhaps say that romance composition
in Backer Grøndahl’s day worked in the same way as does a film today,
as a form of ‘dream industry’.23cf. Richard Maltby, ‘A brief
Romantic Interlude: Dick and Jane go to 3½ Seconds of the Classic
Hollywood Cinema’, in Post-Theory, ed. David Bordwell
and Noel Carroll (Madison, 1996), 452. Consequently, this
was a part of the ‘genre contract’ between her as the composer,
the amateur musicians, and the audience. In his book entitled Music
and Morals published in 1871, the music critic and preacher
Hugh Reginald Haweis described how music took young girls with half-closed eyes
far away from their everyday boredom. Secretly and manipulatively,
they entrusted the music they played with ideas which they would
never have said to anyone. What they played was ‘only a dream –
a dream of comfort sent by music’.24Hugh Reginald Haweis, Music
and Morals (Ludgate Hill: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1871),
111.

This might explain why part of the point in composing To
the Queen of my Heart was to make a large number of people
happy through daydreams or other performed, creative uses of song.
As long as there were unfulfilled or unsatisfied wishes in the user
group in the home music market, there was a need for songs or piano
pieces through which one could daydream. The dreams could be about
praise, gold, or (burning) love for a ‘prince’ who became a husband,
as examples. In everything they did, young women in the increasing longer
waiting period (before they got married) should show that they had
become ‘ladies’. In 1904, the Norway feminist pioneer Ragna Nielsen
commented: ‘Naturally, the only thing they dreamed of was getting
married. Marriage brought meaning to life, significance, respect
[...] whether the women admitted it or not, they thought that a
man, no matter how wicked he might be, was better than no man at
all.’25Ragna Nielsen, Norske Kvinder i første
Halvdel af det 19de Aarhundrede (Kristiania, 1904), 34 f.

The users of romance songs were interested in the sentimental
expression of the songs, and how such expressions could be conveyed
to others with the help of dramatisation. Otherwise this type of
music was characterised by its ‘sentimentality’, and the possibility
to perform a small theatrical or programatic progression (even if
this was rarely realised).

One can vividly imagine how young girls could experience whole
novels in daydream form while they played the keys on the piano
and sang. The dreams contained all the phases of passion: farewells
and reunions, jealousy, possession, and loss.26cf. Ballstaedt
and Widmaier, Salonmusik, 217. In a letter
to Fliess, Freud describes how his Die Traumdeutung (similar
to To the Queen of my Heart) was set up as an ‘imaginary
stroll’.27Siegmund Freud, Drømmetyding (Oslo,
1999), xiv. Together, he and the reader should wander around
in the dream landscape. Daydreams often served as imaginary fulfilment
of conscious desires. In this way, they were perhaps a solution
to an unbearable situation in an otherwise grey everyday life. For
Freud, dreams were cunning coded messages for suppressed sexual desire.
Consequently, his work was discussed at the same level as the romantic
dream books that could be found on the kitchen maid’s bedside table,
printed on inferior paper.28Freud, Drømmetyding, vii
and xxii. Leonard Meyer also writes in Emotion
and Meaning in Music (1956) about the relationship between
music and dreams:

Often music arouses affect through the mediation
of conscious connotation or conscious image process. A sight, a
sound, or a fragrance evokes half-forgotten thoughts of persons,
places, and experiences; stirs up dreams ‘mixing memory with desire’;
or awakens connotations of referential things. These imaginings,
whether conscious or unconscious, are the stimuli to which the affective
response is really made. [...] Music may give rise to images and
trains of thought which, because of their relation to the inner
life of the particular individual, may eventually culminate in affect.
But if such image process is really unconscious, we can never know
them.29Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago,
1956), 256.

The music for the home market gave a daydreaming female audience
precisely such powerful stimuli. At the age of sixteen, once she
had finally finished her ‘compulsory’ education, Backer Grøndahl
wrote to her cousin Gonka of how music helped her forget slush and rain,
and to daydream instead: ‘There are no feelings or passions which
it cannot create, arouse to the highest degree of randomness, you
can cry or rage, be gripped by the most excited enthusiasm and feel
more wretched and humble than the felon in chains.’30December
1863, published in Cecilie Dahm, Agathe Backer Grøndahl (Oslo:
Solum, 1998) 31 f.

Her description of how she used music in her everyday life gives
associations to Tia DeNora's much later descriptions of Music
as a Technology of Self, where she lists numerous examples
of how music stabilises or explores different aspects of the self
or enables it to do things. Her informants used music as their subjective
attributes so that it worked like a catalyst in their experience
of themselves. At the same time, many reported that music had caused
reactions within them through the experience, in such a way that
they subsequently felt that they themselves had been changed:

…Music is appropriated by individuals as a resource
for the ongoing constitution of themselves and the psychological,
physiological and emotional states. As such it points the way to
a more overtly sociological focus on individuals’ socio-cultural
practices for the construction and maintenance of mood, memory and
identity. […] the ostensibly ‘private’ sphere of music use part
and parcel of the cultural constitution of subjectivity, part of
how individuals are involved in constituting themselves as social
agents.31Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (New
York, 2000), 47.

DeNora further points out that the music's rhythm, gestures,
harmonics, style, etc. can be used as references or representatives
of where the user wants to be or to go, be this in an emotional,
physical, or any other sense. The most frequent use her informants
had for music was romantic or intimate:

Music helped them to recall lovers or former partners
and, with these memories, emotionally heightened phases or moments
in their lives. […] Reliving experience through music is also (re)constituting past
experience, it is making manifest within memory what may have been
latent or even absent the first time through.32DeNora,Music
in Everyday Life, 63 and 66.

When the amateur musician played To the Queen of my Heart at
home, she controlled the music like an object, because perception
and action (which are separated in the concert hall) entered into
a dynamic relationship with each other. The song could be experienced as
an idealised love discourse, with the ‘meeting’ placed in a context
that increased ‘romance’ and protected ‘love’ from complicating
circumstances. While she sat and played the piano, she could allow
her thoughts to wander with greater ease.

In this way, multiple discourses were constructed via the body’s
sensory mechanisms.33Eric F. Clarke, Ways of listening:
an ecological approach to the perception of muscial meaning (Oxford,
2005), 150. The music in To the Queen of my Heart made
it possible to ‘imagine’ incidents at the same time as the romance
could ‘procure’ them when the user sang it in social settings.34cf.
Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices. Opera and Musical Narrative
in the Nineteenth Century (New Jersey & Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 64. Singing this romance was perhaps
for some users an attempt to converse, seduce, excite, or confide: in
other words, to converse with specific intentions in mind. Even
though To the Queen of my Heart could be used as
a form of courting scenario in the present, the fundamental nostalgic
perspective has always been dominant. Thus, the song places the
listener in a situation of ‘eavesdropping’ on a ‘private’ conversation,
thought monologue, or intimate confession. In this manner, we can
also envisage that the song could be performed at private parties
in order to put oneself on display.

For more ‘sophisticated’ audiences, To the Queen of my
Heart could take on several of the functions of discourse
and express that which language could not manage or was not permitted
to express. To express ‘all that never in daytime I said’ would
be to make what ought to be left unsaid objectively visible. Words
could say too much. Where music evokes associations, words are specific.
They could dilute the declaration of love and make it impersonal,
make the unusual become usual. Still the message had to be decoded
by a potential recipient. Young girls were aware of the potential
the piano had as a backdrop for meetings between people, flirting,
and sexual behaviour. If the recipient was interested and had access
to the girl’s home, they could remain by the piano, something which
could be interpreted as foreplay to ‘forbidden’ desire. While the
girl let her fingers run across the keys and read the notes (or
looked inside them dreamily), the young man could sit in the background,
or stand by or lean on the piano and cast longing glances at her.
The music could be used as a strategic code or even to camouflage
amorous conversation from eavesdropping. It is through the individual
user’s feelings and body that the romance is naturalised and how
it – quite literally – can physically function through the mechanism
which Foucault calls the disciplining of the body.

A precondition for producing this type of response lies in the
title of To the Queen of my Heart. It gives a vaguely
positive mood and wonderful, good feelings so that, already in the title,
users could interweave their own dreams. As Ballstaedt and Widmaier
have pointed out,

Subsequently, the song could serve as a form of foreplay, or
a surrogate for erotic pleasures which many of the young bourgeoisie
were denied: anyone who was dealing with Cupid would perhaps buy
a composition with titles such as Yearning for Love or To
the Queen of my Heart when he/she was clearly searching
for a like-minded soul.

On the role of the accompaniment, colours, and textures

Beginnings are always strategic for every genre because, along
with the title, they can establish the appropriate mental setting
in which the genre codes in a work can be appreciated. The introductory
and intoning prelude immediately puts us in the mood, situation,
or state of mind from which the song arises. The broken and playful
chords, which shift between tonic and dominant, have a wandering,
undulating, or whispering effect. As the critic in Uusi
Suometar wrote at the performance of To the Queen
of my Heart in Helsinki in 1887: ‘The accompaniment is
of great consequence […] and, if handled correctly, has a spellbinding
effect with its abundance of colour and poetic grace.’36Uusi
Suometar, Helsinki, November 4, 1887. Thus the
accompaniment contributes to place the user at the centre of the
nature that is being depicted in the lyrics. At the same time the
motif adds, in a sense, a spatial metaphor for taking a stroll.
When the singing voice begins to sing, the following question is
explicitly asked: ‘Shall we stroll awhile?’ Already at this point,
the swaying and suggestive introductory motif in the accompaniment
can be interpreted proleptically with respect to the omitted stanzas
in the poem. The melody of the singing voice also adds musical tension
between strolling (through thoughts, dreams, or even reality), and
turning back. The interval leap at the start of To the Queen
of my Heart (a major sixth in the third bar) comes across
as an emphatic metaphor for escapism, like a gesture of wanting
to break loose, as the users of the song perhaps attempted to ‘take
a stroll’ for a short while. The users were quickly – or not so
quickly – overtaken by reality in the same way as the melody, which
eventually reverts to the introductory tone. The leap (and the perceived
attempt to break away) is, however, repeated in the sixth bar.

Backer Grøndahl’s romance has something secretive about it. Emotions
are played out con sordino. This intimate song
forces us not only to hear but to listen: there is whispering at
fast tempo, with wandering sixteenths in the accompaniment. On the
manifest level, it is the soulful and tender pitch that is dominant,
and nothing louder than a piano dynamic is given. The passionate
song never bursts into forte: even if the singer occasionally ‘forgets’ him
or herself with crescendos and ritardandos, he/she quickly regains
control with the help of diminuendos and a return to the original
tempo.

Pauline Hall highlights ‘the confessional fervour one encounters
in many of her [Backer Grøndahl’s] romances, the gently modulated
intonation of the melody and the accompaniment’s almost aggressive
collaboration in the musical interpretation of the fervently agitated
poem.’37Pauline Hall, ‘Agathe Backer-Gröndal’ [sic]
in Musikvärlden, Volume 3, No. 9, 266. Contemporary
reviews of Backer Grøndahl’s songs remarked that she often gave
the piano accompaniment a wide and independent scope. For example,
Karl Flodin points out that the songs occasionally, but infrequently,
work as piano pieces with voice obligato. Most often, however, he
believes that song and piano form an artistic unit of high quality
in which the accompaniment paints the poem’s mood and expression.38Euterpe. Veckotidskrift för Musik, Teater och Skönliteratur no. 42,
Helsinki, October 19, 1901.

Figure 2.
Facsimile of the first page of “To the Queen of my Heart”
(bars 1–10), from one of Backer’s notebooks (National Library of
Norway, Oslo)

It seems as if most critics regarded the accompaniment as an
indispensable contribution to the interpretation of the lyrics and
the musical structure of the songs. Maybe it is the joker in the
pack that will give us more clues to what glimmers under the surface.
It is precisely the experience of the sensual identity of the piano
that can ‘smoulder’ beneath the surface of the singing voice and
the lyrics.

Critics often describe Backer Grøndahl’s accompaniments as ‘pure
virtuosity in tone painting’.39Drammens Tidende, November
4, 1886. Thus it explores the limitations of language and
expresses the latent, concealed, or suspected meanings in the poem.
This has become part of the message in To the Queen of my
Heart, and whatever is not expressed in words is perhaps
expressed musically as the song is sung. The swaying and suggestive
introductory motif in the accompaniment can perhaps already be interpreted
proleptically with respect to the omitted stanzas in the poem. With
this background in mind, it is natural to assume that the driving
accompaniment is interpreting the subtext. In this regard, the accompaniment
becomes a mood creator, a symbol bearer, or picture painter that
counterpoints the singing voice. As Karl Flodin puts it in his Nya
Pressen review during Backer Grøndahl’s first visit to
Helsinki the autumn of 1887: ‘Her intrinsic poetic nature permeates
a secret poetic text that underlies everything she interprets musically.’40Nya Pressen, Helsinki, November 3, 1887.

Relatively few resources are needed to lead the users of such
romances into the longed-for acoustic space of total harmony. A
pleasing harmony was important for success, and usability in the
home music market is also confirmed by the way in which it was received. One
of the means of generating the right mood and emotions consisted
of a heavy application of arpeggios and broken chords. As Ballstaedt
and Widmaier phrase it: ‘Broken chords have something so agreeable
about them for romantic souls’ (Ballstaedt & Widmaier: 303). In
both the short prelude and further on in the accompaniment to To
the Queen of my Heart (see facsimile on page 21), we find
relatively heavy application of arpeggios and broken chords which
end up in unprepared suspensions (Seufzer figures),
almost like a metaphor for the sensual. Inverted Seufzers also
occur, mostly in the middle section, where the suspended chord is
chromatically raised from F sharp to F double sharp in the thirty-third and
forty-first bars (see example note on the next page). As Ballstaedt
and Widmaier have pointed out, the suspension symbolises the daydream
in real life: an excursion, an attempt to hold back the course of
things or, in the figurative sense, to hold back an unsatisfying reality.
Suspensions are only defined through the necessity for them to be
resolved (or, in the case of the metaphor, reconciled). In parallel,
reality will sooner or later enter the daydreams, which will disappear.
Because suspensions are short and transitory, like daydreams, they
are often repeated.41Ballstaedt and Widmaier, Salonmusik, 335 f. They
delay the harmonically correct chord tone, hold it back and thus
make brief breaks in the melodic progression, or lead to an interruption
in the harmony. Because the piano sustains this tension throughout
the entire romance, including the little postlude in bars sixty-six
to seventy-one, it can be said to represent part of the ‘sensual’
throughout the whole romance.

A number of tone-colouring effects have also been inserted. We
find one example in the ninth bar (see facsimile on page 21), where
the composer clearly wants to underline the word ‘never’, since
she inserts a brief and meaningful break that builds the tension before
she repeats the word as many as three times. The tritonic interval,
which is harmonised with a German augmented sixth chord, helps to
heighten the tension in that it postpones the dominant's resolution,
which also comes directly on the third beat, without having to take
the usual ‘detour’ around the cadential 6–4 chord to avoid consecutive fifths.

Another ‘sentimental’ ingredient to be noted is the primarily
chromatic falling bass line in large portions of the middle section.
The chromatic voicing contains some surprising chord progressions,
such as the transition from the shortened secondary dominant in bar
forty-four to the subdominant minor in bar forty-five and the tonic
(second inversion) in bar forty-six (all related to C sharp major,
the temporary key in most of the middle section):

Figure 3.
Middle section of “To the Queen of my Heart”, bars 27–52

Music and text: ‘All that never in daytime I said’

At the very core of To the Queen of my Heart lies
a contrast between what can and what cannot be put in words. The
solution was to let the music itself express the omitted stanzas
and the possible sexual implications of the lyrics. To stroll quietly
out into the night and the secretive darkness to whisper was perhaps
not on everyone’s agenda. What could not be said is the code: singing
the romance could send a personal love message to the ‘chosen one’.
In one of her books on decorum, Isa von der Lütt spoke passionately
about music expressing emotions deeper, stronger and more powerful
than words;42Ballstaedt & Widmaier, Salonmusik, 234. in
Backer’s time the spoken word could be no more than indirect. Consequently,
the romance had to be ‘read’ in and by its cultural context. Against
this background, To the Queen of my Heart could
provide a solution to the question of how to express a love that
could not be put in words.

Characteristically enough, Backer chose to omit the Danish translation's
more sexually loaded stanzas about ‘rocking with me on the crest
of the waves’, ‘the struggle’ that raged ‘in my breast’, and ‘the
strange voice that rose up from the sea’. She chooses instead to
focus on the stanzas in which the feelings the couple have for each
other are expressed con sordino. The predominant
ideals of the day suspected most female expressions of desire and
lust of being unnatural. Publicly expressed feminist issues focused
on temperance and moral decency. It was possible to treat these
norms with a certain degree of creativity, as fiction did in ways
that were difficult to suppress. Thomas Laqueur, however, emphasised
how in the 1800s it was asserted that women were passionless, should
be modest, and should create, but not feel, desire.43Thomas
Laqueur, Making Sex. Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud (Cambridge, Mass, 1990), 150. Nevertheless,
Claes Ekenstam states that the forbidden sexuality smouldered just
below the surface.44Claes Ekenstam, Kroppens idéhistoria:
disciplinering och karaktærsdaning i Sverige 1700-1950 (Hedemora,
1993), 204–214.

If we follow this line of thought further, could it be that the
omission of the two stanzas in the original poem are audible in
the music, and that we can hear a musical ‘ellipsis’? Could there
– as Christopher Morris brings up in his analysis of Delius’ music
– be parallels in the music with the well-known technique before
film sex, when the camera fades out to give the impression of a
discreet withdrawal from a passionate scene?45Morris, Reading
Opera Between the Lines, 38. Before the omitted stanzas
and what some of the users may have felt as an ellipsis in bar fifty-five,
a tiny glimpse is given of what one misses out on, at the same time
as the ‘sigh figures’ in the A section’s accompaniment are ‘anticipated’
in C sharp major in bars fifty-two to fifty-four (the notes A sharp
– G sharp) and the upbeat to bar fifty-eight in the ‘correct’ pitch
(D sharp – C sharp).

Figure 4.
“To the Queen of my Heart”, bars 52–59

In the following bars, the composer, the pianist, and the singer
discreetly withdraw from the more passionate sections of the poem.
When they return, one can get the impression that the mood has changed
so that the A section functions like a summary of whatever has –
or has not – happened.

Perhaps Backer Grøndahl encoded the two omitted, more erotically
loaded stanzas in the poem to intentionally make the song ambiguous?
By not expressing the lyrics in the two stanzas, Backer Grøndahl
created more points of entry into the song for the users. Thus the
song becomes not one romance, but rather several romances
that can be heard or performed in parallel. Users of the song who
chose only to engage themselves in the surface and the lyrics that
were on display, as they were expressed, could experience the song
as relatively ‘innocent’, and rightly so.46cf. the interpretation
of Casablanca by Maltby, ‘A brief Romantic Interlude’, 438. In
this way, the romance would reach a wider group of users who would
then want to buy the score. Backer Grøndahl’s substitute for implicative
classic structures is perhaps, as Subotnik describes it in Chopin,
discreet ‘analogy’.47Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, Music
and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 124. In this regard, Backer Grøndahl perhaps
avoided users discovering that they performed or listened to different
romances in parallel. Any ‘vices’ could consequently be left to
more sophisticated performers and listeners of To the Queen
of my Heart.48Maltby, ‘A Brief Romantic Interlude’,
448. Listeners and performers who already knew (and had
perhaps recited) the poem would immediately have precisely those
two stanzas in mind, and in a more sophisticated interpretation
would find that these stanzas, through their absence, smouldered
beneath the surface of the tone setting. Some of their interpretations
of the song would have inevitably been performance interpretations
that could not easily be written down in the notes. How the users
interpreted To the Queen of my Heart would be influenced by
the way in which the listener or user related to the content of
the two omitted stanzas in relation to the song. Backer Grøndahl
offers an incentive to ‘read inside’ the romance or to activate
the textual ‘absence’ (the ellipsis) in ways that open up an intertextual
field of many possible meanings which are not explicitly articulated
in the romance as ‘text’.

Conclusion: Body, voice, and smouldering female passions

Backer Grøndahl often performed To the Queen of my Heart at
the same concerts as Felix Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte,
and during her London visit in 1889, George Bernard Shaw praised
precisely her ‘Mendelssohnic sense of form in composition’.49The
Star, London, July 13, 1889. It is in the ‘wordless’
sections of the romance that the true To the Queen of my
Heart emerges. The phrase ‘All that never in daytime I
said’ gently hints at the omitted stanzas as subtext never being
expressed verbally. ‘Thoughts that were never put into words’ could
perhaps mean an idea, primarily pertaining to emotion. As Carl Dahlhaus
points out, the feelings portrayed were perhaps neither ‘outside
of’ nor ‘ahead of’ the musical form of expression and performance,
but rather ‘coincided’ with them.50Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische
und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1988),
140. In a letter to Marc André Souchay in Leipzig on 15
October 1842, Mendelssohn, who never published a word about music,
stated how he distrusted language:

Mendelssohn would not tell his friend whether he had had certain
words in mind when he composed his Lieder ohne Worte.
The preciseness of the feelings expressed through the music was
precision in music itself. If titles, like ‘melancholy’ or ‘resignation’
were added, these notions would entail different things to different
users of the compositions. According to Mendelssohn, the totally
abstract peculiarity with which music was perceived by many philosophical
aesthetes was ‘specific’ and therefore impossible to talk about,
since the influence of music was sensual, emotional, materialised,
and physical – though not distinct from cognition. Thus, music assumes
many of the functions of discourse, or as Caralis put it in the
song, music expresses ‘all that never in daytime I said’. To use
the same words was, in Mendelssohn’s opinion, an inadequate guarantee
of a common understanding. When an authentic emotional experience
was reported by a listener, having put it in words might have distorted
it, or as Meyer has remarked: ‘For emotional states are much more
subtle and varied than are the few crude and standardised words
which we use to denote them.’52Meyer, Emotion and meaning
in music, 71. Accordingly, what Mendelssohn points
out in his letter is that one or two parties, using the same words
about an experience, are feeling, thinking, wanting, and fearing
different things.

In To the Queen of my Heart, Backer Grøndahl
shows what Hall described as her skillfullness in expressing unspoken
but extremely important words musically.53Pauline Hall, ‘Agathe
Backer Grøndahl’ in Dagbladet, Oslo, December 1,
1947. At the same time, music, as Carolyn Abbate points
out, is apparently without discursive meaning – and this makes problems
of critical reading and interpretation acute. Compared to music, words
used to discuss it are often perceived as simple and less beautiful.
What gets ‘lost in translation’ becomes what goes without saying,
or what is not possible to mention explicitly in words.54Abbate, Unsung
Voices, xv. All attempts to distinguish writing
about music from ‘the music itself’ are pointless, since interpretive
writing about a composition becomes somehow part of it as it travels
through history. Edward Cone refers to Roger Sessions’s statements
about how music reproduces the most intimate essences, all the fine
nuances of dynamic variation of our inner lives:

Emotion is specific, individual and conscious; music
goes deeper than this, to the energies which animate our psychic
life… It reproduces for us the most intimate essence, the tempo
and the energy, of our spiritual being… – all, in fact, of the fine
shades of dynamic variation of our inner life. It reproduces these
far more directly and more specifically than is possible through
any other medium of human communication.55Edward T. Cone, The
Composer’s Voice (Berkeley, Cal., 1974), 34 f.

Would users of To the Queen of my Heart – as
Morris suggests – ‘rather feel music with their bodies than understand
it with their emotions?’56Morris, Reading Opera Between
the Lines, 30. Roland Barthes wrote extensively
about the musical body. As stated by Richard Leppert, ‘Barthes’
insight is that making music, unlike “mere” listening, necessarily
brings the sensual body “back” into the equation. […] To make music
is a cognitive-physical act, in which the separation of mind from
body momentarily disappeares.’57Richard Leppert, The
Sight of Sound (Berkeley, University of California Press,
1993), 215. In The Grain of the Voice Barthes
proposes that music could be regarded as ‘physical stereophony’,
and writes that music holds the body’s figures (‘somathemes’), where
the texture forms the musical meaning process. His listening is
sensualised by his understanding of what he in other places calls
‘the grain of the voice’.58Roland Barthes, The Grain
of the Voice. Interviews, 1962–1980 (Berkeley: University
of California Press 1991). As Ansa Lønstrup points out
in Stemmen og Øret, the sound of the voice becomes
the body’s acoustic representation or echo. It refers to the body’s
physical space as much as to the space around it.59Ansa Lønstrup, Stemmen
og øret. Studier i vokalitet og auditiv kultur (Århus,
2004), 14 f.

‘The grain’, Barthes explains in a passage on the ‘body’ of the
singing voice, is the hand that writes the music, or the body parts
that perform it. Barthes is interested in the singing voice as a
source of attraction, and understands its ‘grain’ as qualities that
make the individual voice something special and worth listening
to. He also insists that the ‘grain of the voice’ is not only the
voice’s timbre. Barthes takes Julia Kristeva’s ‘geno-text’ and ‘pheno-text’
as his point of departure, and adapts them to apply to music by
using the terms ‘geno-song’ and ‘pheno-song’. In Barthes’ interpretation,
‘pheno-songs’ are the phenomena that make up the structure of sung
language, the rules of the music genre, and the composer’s idiom
and interpretative style: in other words, what it is in the performance
that serves the communication, representation, and expression. ‘Geno-songs’
represent the other layer in the voice: the volume or space, where
meaning is generated from the language and its material dimensions.
‘Geno-songs’ form a ‘play on meanings’ that has nothing to do with communication.
In ‘geno-songs’, the meaning-bearing is disregarded in favour of
a sensual meaning.60cf. Derek B Scott. (ed.), Music,
Culture, and Society. A Reader (Oxford, 2000), 114. The
‘grain of the voice’ is, as Lønstrup points out, the body in the
voice as heard by another body.61Lønstrup, Stemmen
og øret, 18. If we hear the ‘grain’ in a song
and ascribe it with theoretical value (i.e. the occurrence of the
‘text’ in the work), we make an assessment, part of which will be
individual and part of which will compel the listener to listen
to his/her relationship with the singing voice. Such a relationship
is, according to Barthes, erotic, but by no means
subjective. Accordingly, the ‘body of the voice’ would also eroticise
the listening, in that those who listened to the song, for example
to To the Queen of my Heart, would relate it to
their own body. The musical pleasure was constantly repeated and
did not revolve around a particular ecstasy. As Leppert indiciates,
if the semantic and the empirical are anywhere near being orgasmic
at a time when music as a practice was culturally coded as feminine,
then the scandal associated with such music was more serious that
previously believed. According to Leppert, Barthes’ point is that,
contrary to ‘pure’ listening, music-making brings by necessity the
sensual body back to the action. Victorians as well as Oscarians
were in fear of this body.62Leppert and McClary, Music
and Society, 216 and 230.

Perhaps To the Queen of my Heart was a higher
substitute for a sensuality that women could not express otherwise.
The voice of the heart – the implied layer of meaning – was the
utterance of the stifled ego. The surface itself represents the
very essence of simplicity and innocence, while the intense and
passionate simmers beneath for those who choose or need to interpret
it thus.

A natural basis of
comparison – musically as well as analytically – is the music by
Delius, discussed by Christopher Morris in Reading Opera
Between the Lines in the chapter entitled: ‘A Walk on the
Wild Side’, 25 ff.

Already in 1962 Umberto Eco launched ‘the open
work’ in The Open Work [Opera Aperta] (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).In 19th century
music the ‘work’ concept was filled by a relatively distinct performer-oriented
tradition.